Peter Debruge

Most audiences want action to feel like action, whereas Eusebio makes it look too much like choreography: No matter how dynamic, every fight scene seems rehearsed to within an inch of its life.

Not all movies need to serve up profound insights into the human condition, but the ones that don’t should at least be entertaining, and Twohy’s particular strain of absurdism is not just contrived, but deeply unfunny.

The movie looks sharp enough, but lands like a rapier with a cork on it.

“The Greatest Hits” feels like the remainder-bin version of better love stories.

Madame Web feels like a cross between an extended soda commercial and a teaser trailer for still more spinoffs.

Pain Hustlers takes an off-putting mock-documentary approach to this tragedy, focusing on a handful of sleazebag salespeople who bent the rules to incentivize doctors to prescribe Lonafin (the film’s fictional Subsys substitute) first for treating cancer pain, and later for conditions as mild as migraines.

Slumberland is stronger at conjuring elaborate dream worlds than it is at crafting a satisfying emotional foundation, which is generally true of Lawrence’s past projects as well.

Sure, it’s a “Harry Potter” rip-off, but had Feig taken the time to let the film breathe, it might have stood on its own. Unlike Hogwarts, where fresh surprises lay waiting around every corner, this school seems to exist in concept only — and not a particularly good one at that.

Kosinski is a gifted director, but his specialty is juggling human elements with complex visual effects. He is not cut out for this kind of comedy. His design choices are all wrong. The execution is tone deaf.

Judd Apatow made a movie. A very bad movie.

The result is an aggressively unfunny look at human-robot relations in a garish, cartoonishly rendered future.

Don’t Look Up plays like the leftie answer to “Armageddon” — which is to say, it ditches the Bruckheimer approach of assembling a bunch of blue-collar heroes to rocket out to space and nuke the approaching comet, opting instead to spotlight the apathy, incompetence and financial self-interest of all involved.

A shockingly dull look at a fascinating disorder affecting humans who believe they were born into the wrong species.

Managed (more than directed) by motion-capture star-turned-aspiring blockbuster helmer Andy Serkis, Venom: Let There Be Carnage has all the indications of a slap-dash cash grab. The set-pieces look sloppy, the visual effects are all over the place, and the laughs come largely at the movie’s expense.

The movie feels like both an advertisement for this posh, ultra-modern oasis and a late-20th-century smear of the people and culture one might expect to find there.

The more you start to nitpick this movie, the more innumerable its plot holes appear, until the whole thing collapses in on itself.

Hopkins isn’t awful in The Virtuoso, but the movie that surrounds him is.

When it comes to confrontations, the movie wimps out, putting more effort into New World-building than in the largely generic characters who populate it.

Sir Billi lacks the looks or charm of even the most rudimentary CG offerings being made today, as if not only the animation but also the plot and characters were spat out by off-the-shelf software.

As it is, the film feels simultaneously far too heavy and not at all substantial, a long, slow buildup to something wondrous that never comes.

This is the kind of movie where the most dynamic thing in every scene is the art direction, followed by the natty retro costumes (which Jean must have used the cash to buy, since she didn’t have time to pack), and only then comes the people.

A movie like this would be a good start, if this were 1980. A decade and a half after “Brokeback Mountain,” however, it feels like a huge step backward.

Bloody, barely coherent and about as fun as having your face dragged across asphalt from a moving SUV.

The “raunchy” set-pieces feel like road bumps en route to a too obvious and disappointingly tidy conclusion. Do yourself a favor and spend five minutes — and as many dollars — researching something else to watch instead.

What a waste. Screenwriters Conor McPherson and Hamish McColl have taken a not-very-good book and turned it into a downright awful movie.

It’s an offensive eyesore in which looting and anarchy are treated as window dressing, law and order come in the form of mind control, and police brutality is so pervasive as to warrant a trigger warning.

The finished film plays at times like an out-of-control pitch meeting, lurching from one ostensibly clever idea to the next without having taken the trouble to connect the dots, or even to remain consistent with the two simple rules it sets out for itself.

As audiences, we trust filmmakers to do a reasonably accurate job of representing stories based in truth, and we get angry when they take the kind of liberties Avnet and company allow themselves here. As if it weren’t bad enough that Three Christs were boring, it’s impossible to believe, and for that, there is no cure.

Tom Hooper’s outlandishly tacky interpretation seems destined to become one of those once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments that mars the résumés of great actors (poor Idris Elba, already scarred enough as the villainous Macavity) and trips up the careers of promising newcomers (like ballerina Francesca Hayward, whose wide-eyed, mouth-agape Victoria displays one expression for the entire movie).

Sooner or later, Hinako is going to have to learn to face the world on her own, which is where the tension finally arises before this dopey film reaches its sappy conclusion — by showing its heroine, so effortless on water, “learning to ride life’s waves, too.”

If America goes to war sometime in the next year, pundits will have a field day with this movie. But barring that, it’s just another ugly, unpleasant slog through a disposable fantasy universe. The true Disney villains in this case are off screen, sabotaging the studio’s canon from within.

The movie amounts to a few weak gags stretched out to feature length.

In its native France, “Dilili” was released in stereoscopic 3D, which may have helped things look less wooden, but it feels as if the director stuck to a style that works well in silhouette — where characters typically appeal in profile, and bend only at elbow, knee and waist. In any case, it hurts the brain, which is clearly the opposite of what Ocelot intended.

Gemini Man is a case in which an awful lot of effort has gone into making an awfully lazy action movie.

Franco has a truly radical streak in him, and considering how poorly the movie functions as a traditional crowdpleaser, he might as well have gone all out and pushed Zeroville to whatever event horizon the deranged project called for. His mistake wasn’t trying to adapt Erickson’s novel at all, but attempting to turn it into a tragic romance between Vikar and Soledad.

Here, it’s the screenwriters, not the cartel, who should be held accountable for conjuring a virginal relative only to violate and degrade her.

So much of the unpleasantness has been scrubbed from the picture, until what remains is precisely the kind of dishonest, sanitized no-help-to-anyone TV-movie version of death that inspired Teague to set the record straight in the first place.

Distractingly over-directed ... [Hawley] triple-knots his own shoelaces here, stumbling over cumbersome metaphors (butterflies, floating) and high-concept solutions to straightforward dramatic problems when he should have just entrusted his leading lady to carry the narrative.

What was novel when Eddie Murphy did it for “The Nutty Professor,” however, feels lazy by comparison here, with hardly enough story to support them, and even though the transformations are impressive, there’s an alarming clumsiness when it comes to Wayans acting against himself.

American audiences typically adore “white savior movies,” but this one pushes the stereotype to such an extreme ... it’s impossible to ignore how badly the film marginalizes the courageous Ethiopian refugees about whom it purports to care so deeply.

Isabelle is curiously old-fashioned and not at all original enough to distinguish itself in American release.

A disappointment ... The story feels lean, and most of the cast, while convincing, don’t leap off the screen the way the ensemble in an Andrea Arnold movie does.

There’s a serious mismatch between the personality of Samantha McIntyre’s script (which seems to be written as a kooky, do-it-yourself comedy, à la “Being John Malkovich” or “Napoleon Dynamite”) and Larson’s directing style, which feels entirely incompatible with whimsy.

While Talbot and Fails claim to have walk-and-talked their way all over San Francisco, the script — and especially the dialogue — is the most disappointing element of their first feature.

The result is a revisionist fiasco, too dense with Shakespeare allusions for casual moviegoers, and too fast and loose with the facts for those who know a thing or two about the man. In short, All Is True takes the English language’s most gifted dramatist and reduces his sunset years to a sloppy soap opera.

It’s messy and distressingly unmemorable, which is a shame since there are no shortage of great Looney Tunes-level cartoon gags wasted along the way, including an ingenious rope bridge sequence worthy of golden-age Warner Bros. animation.

What could have been a powerful ode to the impact that movies have in shaping our identities — and by extension, the reason broken people are drawn to the profession, through which they hope to reach others like themselves — becomes an over-the-top celebration of Dolan himself.

There are no billionaires here, just a lot of testosterone where the movie’s brains ought to be.

So, if you like piña coladas, or movies in which severe childhood trauma can be hugged out on an ocean cruise, then you’ll like Like Father. For everyone else, skip the imitation and seek out “Toni Erdmann” instead.

This embarrassingly earnest film — produced by Charlize Theron — argues for the importance of doctors going the extra mile, when textbook diagnoses won’t do.

[Travolta's] performance ain’t lousy, but the movie that surrounds it is, and it’s almost laughable to see this iconic star trying so hard on behalf of a project that is so compromised in its intentions.

Filho obviously wants to convey the naive outlook an impressionable young girl would have on her own situation, but there’s far too much manipulation involved to take her selection of scenes seriously.

Though Macy is an odd fit to direct (coming at the talky script like it was a madcap piece of theater), the wonky tone is all screenwriter Will Aldis’ invention.

The trouble isn’t just that Midnight Sun cherry-picks the most poetic elements of a real-world disease to serve its transparently manipulative ends, but that it offers audiences such an unrealistic portrait of romance in the process.

A toothless ode to a still-living celebrity, it’s a film that may appeal to very young children and very old ladies, but seems sure to bore everyone in between.

The only thing more reliable than bad weather is bad movies, and in that respect, Geostorm is right on forecast.

This Is Your Death deeply misunderstands depression, treating suicide as a convenient device for its pea-brained premise.

Not only is there nothing presently in the zeitgeist to which to peg such a story (except perhaps the Dane DeHaan-Cara Delevingne reunion nobody asked for, shot before “Valerian” and shelved for nearly a year), but the entire package has a curiously old-fashioned feel — and not just because it takes place 380 years ago.

It’s a dark and all-around unpleasant journey to take.

Everyone has a different idea of what’s funny, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being amused by War Machine, a colossally miscalculated satire.

It’s devastating to think how far Jones has fallen in the four decades since “Holy Grail,” in which he got more laughs banging a few coconuts together than he musters from his entire movie.

The movie is not entirely without charm — although it’s safe to say, it’s mostly without charm. In fact, the movie has so little charm to offer that it borders on insipid.

A risible excuse for comedy that treats compulsory education as a joke and violence as a reasonable way to solve problems.

If romance-seeking audiences know what’s best for them, they’ll put some space between themselves and this movie.

The trouble with Paris Can Wait — apart from the sheer agony of being trapped with two insufferable characters as they sample gorgeously photographed food and wine that we can’t taste — is the way the movie seems so willing to let its leading lady be defined by her husband’s job.

You know things are getting bad when an instantly forgettable, nearly impossible-to-follow, Chinese-language action movie manages to score a U.S. release simply because of Chan’s involvement.

By second-guessing what audiences want, Murakami falls into the same trap studios do when trying to appease mass tastes, delivering a film that features many of his familiar designs and characters but precious little in the way of personal vision.

Though billed as a documentary, this 59-minute doodle barely rises above homemovie status.

This is manufactured sentiment, less interested in provoking thought than in manipulating emotion, constructed of human obstacles overcome, stirring speeches delivered and heart-rending flashbacks unveiled, all suspended like so much Spam in the jelly of its own score.

Given the fine past work of its many parents, there was clearly potential here, but as delivered, Seventh Son amounts to nothing short of a creative miscarriage.

21 Years: Richard Linklater makes for a disappointingly hollow hagiography: gushy, superficial and strangely overdue — arriving significantly later than its title prescribes.

At the very least, Kite could have given Jackson some scenery to chew.

Though much of the script borders on unbearable, compounded by “Juno” composer Mateo Messina’s tell-you-how-to-feel score, writer Daniel Taplitz manages to sneak in some poignant self-help aphorisms here and there.

It’s worse than tacky, trivializing depression for a handful of easy laughs and pop-psychology platitudes.

A partly authentic, partly scripted behind-the-scenes featurette that never quite conveys the star’s “high/curious” interest in all things taboo.

This been-there-done-that story marks a pretty banal debut for writer-director Alain Marie, who seems far more interested in aping Refn and early-career Michael Mann than in finding his own style.

This sloppy, button-pushing black comedy reveals a crew desperately in need of counseling — less in anger management than in the fundamentals of screenwriting, camerawork and structure.

The script is nearly all dialogue, including several eloquent spoken passages toward the end, but it’s a lousy story, ineptly constructed and rendered far too difficult to follow.

Fancy-sounding dialogue and handsome widescreen lensing goes only so far to disguise the shallowness of the underlying material.

Chemistry you can fake, but charm is far harder to pull off, and Baggage Claim never quite succeeds on that front.

Granted, Landesman feels an obligation to history, but there’s something ponderously obvious about the way so many of these scenes are played.

Lambert brings a forlorn dimension to his seductive young role, but Bell never really convinces as the older woman. Despite flirting with controversy, the actress seems reluctant to plunge fully into potential unlikability, nor does the film quite give her the chance.

Even the hackiest of Hollywood writers would have known how to fix its considerable script problems.

The wallpaper emotes more than Ryan Gosling does in Only God Forgives, an exercise in supreme style and minimal substance.

As Scandi directors go, Niels Arden Oplev couldn’t be hotter. After putting his stamp on “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the Dane has what appears to be his pick of projects. So why follow it up with such revenge-fantasy dreck as Dead Man Down, a derivative collection of brazen plot holes and latenight-cable cliches into which he drags “Dragon” star Noomi Rapace?

If nonchalance were an Olympic sport, Max would be a gold medalist, and watching Somebody Up There Likes Me is about as much fun as being a spectator at that event might sound.

The cross-dressing "Madea" star seems out of his depth playing the hard-boiled detective made famous by Morgan Freeman in "Along Came a Spider" and "Kiss the Girls." Even action helmer Rob Cohen ("The Fast and the Furious," "XXX") seems to be off his game here.

When confronted with real problems--and there's enough melodrama here to top a movie-of-the-week marathon on Lifetime--these otherwise empowered characters seem helpless to defend themselves.

Something about the sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, doesn't seem nearly as obnoxious as the original.

With an exciting way out, the audience would have gladly overlooked all the loose ends from earlier in the movie. But the way Hall plays it, he undermines the early style and intelligence of his all-black action movie, taking audiences for the wrong kind of ride in the end.

The explanation for all this mayhem eludes me, and even a lame last-minute twist isn't enough to cover the fact that Jigsaw ain't as clever as the movie thinks he is.

Zombie's film plays more like an experimental pastiche than an outright homage to those classic road-trip-gone-wrong movies.

For all of 10 minutes, Gray Matters looks like it might have accomplished the impossible: uncovering a romantic-comedy scenario audiences haven't seen a million times before.

Diesel valiantly but unsuccessfully tries to raise this inane bit of Mr. Mommery above its afternoon-special standing.

Amounts to Chicken Soup for the Soul-style torture -- unless you like that kind of thing.

What's missing is some faith in the audience's intelligence and, more importantly, the jokes.

Unfortunately, this dimwit concept barely has enough spark to power a single strand of Christmas lights, much less rival the classic-by-comparison "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" in side-splitting Yuletide snafus.